[Kde-pim] Palm Treo 700p redux

Sun Dec 16 17:19:10 GMT 2007

On 11/15/07, Ryan Novosielski <novosirj at umdnj.edu> wrote:
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> Hello developers,

Hi Ryan.  Very sorry to have taken so long to get back to you.  Real Life
(TM) has totally consumed me for the last 2+ months, so I'm just now
catching up on kde* mailing lists.

A couple of things about KPilot that confound me, and are reproducible.
> Now that I have a little more time and some decent equipment, it'd be
> nice to start helping out again.

I would love the help!!  =:)

I have a Treo 700p, and the Zire/T5/etc. workaround had worked pretty
> well for this particular device... two problems though:

Yeah.  I broke that a while ago with the set of changes that made it
possible to use libusb and bluetooth.  *sigh* Fix one thing, break
another...  The problem is that just about every Palm device is different
from the previous in slight, devastating, quirky ways.  The good news is
that now I have a 700p myself (previously used a 650 for ~ 2 years), and so
now I see first hand the connection problems you're talking about.    =:)

1) After a sync, or an attempted sync, KPilotDaemon holds onto the USB
> port. This means that since my device is one that drops the USB
> connection when switching from sync mode to draw-power mode, it will
> lose ttyUSB1 (the one that it uses) and move to ttyUSB3 when it
> reconnects. Here's how it goes down:

Yep, you're absolutely right.  I'm seeing the same thing here.  I think I
know what the problem is and I just need to find the time to sit down and
hack it into submission.

21:57:02 HotSync Completed.
> 21:57:02 Next HotSync will be: HotSync. Please press the HotSync button.
> 21:57:12 Trying to open device /dev/ttyUSB1...
> 21:57:23 Cannot accept Pilot (Success)
> 21:57:23 Could not open device: /dev/ttyUSB1 (will retry)
> 21:57:36 Cannot accept Pilot (No such process)
> 21:57:48 Cannot accept Pilot (No such process)
> 21:58:00 Cannot accept Pilot (No such process)
>
> ...and the progress bar is at 10%. At this point, any attempt to sync
> will fail since KPilot has ttyUSB1 open and the phone cannot use it.

Correct.  =:(

In fact, the only way to solve it appears to be to cause KPilot to hold
> open ttyUSB1 as I was describing, and let the phone return to the
> charging state. The phone will be using ttyUSB3. I then close and reopen
> KPilot, that tries to connect to ttyUSB1 and fails and says it will
> retry later because it's likely a USB device. Doing a HotSync then
> causes the device to drop its connection and go back to USB1, which then
> works. Doing this any other way causes KPilot to try to sync right away
> when the phone is just charging (and not going to exchange any data),
> which then gets in the way of a real sync.

Yep.  Actually, a running KPilot can be forced to drop the connection it's
holding on to by clicking the "reset the device connection" button in
kpilot's GUI.  And unfortunately, it takes ~ 30 seconds for kpilot to
forcibly kill off its device comm thread.  I'll be looking into fixing that
too.  =:/

2) I've now accidentally blanked my Treo twice. I don't know this is
> because I'm a troublemaker (quite possible), but it really should NOT
> happen. This appears to be the way that it happens:
>
> a) I select "Copy Handheld to PC", knowing full well that I've just
> cleaned up the stuff on my PC is either undesirable (very out of date --
> so out of date that I may have formatted the phone since) or removed
> entirely (I may have decided that I wanted to just start with the
> Handheld data since I haven't been using KPilot).
> b) KPilot sees that the Last PC is not this PC (standard if I had not
> been using KPilot, since if I had any sense, I would have been backing
> it up someplace -- in this case, my Windows PC at work), and since the
> box regarding "Do full sync when changing PC's" is checked, it does not
> do what I asked it to do (instead opting for a full sync).

Yeah, you're right, that's a problem.   I think the decision tree gives
precedence to full sync over copyxxtoxx.  =:/

c) Magic happens (I'm not sure WHY a full sync even with a blank PC
> should cause the Handheld to become blank -- it didn't get the contacts
> since I cancelled prior to some other happenings... not sure if it would
> have blanked the whole phone).
> d) My phone has no appointments and no to do's.

Hm.  You're right, that shouldn't happen.  In the 3+ years of using KPilot,
I've never once hit that myself.  =:(

Sorry?

I now have an SD card, so I can backup my phone whenever I want. I'd
> like to see if I can't figure out why both of these things are happening
> and if there is any way around either one (I know the second one
> wouldn't likely happen in everyday use, but it's good to avoid cases
> like this where an odd circumstance will blow away your data).

I would LOVE your help.  =:)  I idle in #kpilot on freenode irc constantly.
If you need help getting started in tracking this down, please stop by and
see me.  And I would LOVE any code patches that you could provide.  =:)

[ignoring KMail problems which I know nothing of...  =;)]

Thanks Ryan!!

-- 
-[ Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper    //  http://movingparts.net ]-
-[ KDE PIM Developer         //  http://www.kde.org  ]-
-[ bash fun -> :(){ :|:&};:  //  Numbers 6:22-26 ]-
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